When The Lightbulb Goes
Off
When you hear the phrase "the
lightbulb went off", most people think of having an idea...or of
having a burnt out light source. Sometimes, BOTH are true!
Burnt out glass bulbs (of any former wattage) can be used to
form shaped elements used in making hollow lentil beads or
pendants.
Glass bulbs withstand baking at 300 degrees F quite nicely, and
the smooth tops allow for placing circles of polymer clay--or other
shapes--and then easily removing the baked piece after it is taken
from the oven.
An easy way to keep bulbs from rolling around is to recycle a
cardboard egg carton. Remove the top, and turn the egg carton
upside down.
Place the screw end of bulbs into the holder in the indented
areas between the egg-holders. If you bake in this holder, make
sure to move the oven rack down a bit so that the entire thing will
fir into the oven without being near the heating elements. Often I
will bake in a pan instead of the holder in order to fit into a
smaller oven, and then a bit of care and a bit of Poly-fil quilt
batting can be used to keep the polymer clay portions from touching
each other.
Having the holder allows me to keep them in place while working
on them, and thats a help too! Some of the bulb formed pieces are
flat sheets of clay, but others are more dimensional. Many include
faces formed using polymer clay pulls from my handmade molds, and some of these use crystals or beads for
eyes.
All dimensional beads with faces are
stained to make the details stand out after baking and sanding.
Once the rounded half circles are baked, they are sanded down
around the outside edges. Many people use two of these shapes
affixed together with glue or liquid polymer clay and then rebaked
and drilled. The large Japanese Girl Bead
shown in a previous Bead Bugle article was
made in this manner, using two circular domes of polymer clay that
were baked again with TLS (liquid Sculpey) sealing the edges to
create a bead. TLS is now available in white/trans, black, gold,
and silver.
The resulting lentil bead is hollow, and very light weight.
Smaller circles can also be shaped on metal paint palettes and
baked directly on them in order to make coordinating smaller discs
or lentil beads. They can be decorated in any number of ways, with
millefiore canes, imprints from stamps of
texture tools, hand carved details and more.
These can be drilled very easily with a hand drill or Dremel
tool. Circles can be cut quickly and evenly by using circle cutters
meant for cookies. Some come in sets of graduated sizes. Other
shapes, such as stars, can also be used. Off The Beaten Path has some
wonderful sets of cutters that are very useful to polymer clay
artisans. The rounded half circles also make good pendants with the
addition of some clay to form a bail at the top. Or, pierce at the
top using a hand drill and add a jump ring, then thread a cord or
chain through that.
